Wednesday, August 27, 2014

In this blog and in my book The Last Psychoanalyst I have inveighed against our modern tendency
to make empathy the seat of all moral virtue.

At times, I seemed to be nearly alone in holding this
viewpoint. Now, Yale psychologist Paul Bloom, at work on a book about empathy
has declared that he is against it.

He argues the point persuasively in the Boston Review and I
will review his ideas at length.

By way of an introduction, I point out that most of the
confusion about empathy lies in the fact that the therapy culture had made
empathy the basis for moral behavior.

To be clear, empathy is a feeling, it is an emotion. You do
not act empathically or even empathetically.

Being moral means following rules or laws. Some will argue
that empathy motivates people to follow rules, but it need not. Empathy does not tell you what to do or what not to do.

Confucius said that it’s better to follow rules, to perform
rituals without the right feeling than not to do it at all. If so, people are
motivated, not by their feelings, but by their sense of propriety.

Making empathy the basis for morality is to misunderstand
the basis for morality.

Bloom introduces his thought here:

… I’ve come to realize that taking a position
against empathy is like announcing that you hate kittens—a statement so
outlandish it can only be a joke. And so I’ve learned to clarify, to explain
that I am not against morality, compassion, kindness, love, being a good
neighbor, doing the right thing, and making the world a better place. My claim
is actually the opposite: if you want to be good and do good, empathy is a poor
guide.

But there are different kinds of empathy. Normally, we
recognize that someone is in pain by reading facial expressions and tone of
voice. When we do so we change our own facial expressions. This produces a recognizable emotion.
It helps us to identify what we are seeing, but it does not necessarily mean
that we are feeling the other person’s pain.

In truth, if you want to be precise, we can never really
feel anyone else’s pain.

Bloom defines his terms here:

The
word “empathy” is used in many ways, but here I am adopting its most common
meaning, which corresponds to what eighteenth-century philosophers such as Adam
Smith called “sympathy.” It refers to the process of experiencing the world as
others do, or at least as you think they do. To empathize with someone is to
put yourself in her shoes, to feel her pain. Some researchers also use the term
to encompass the more coldblooded process of assessing what other people are
thinking, their motivations, their plans, what they believe. This is sometimes
called “cognitive,” as opposed to “emotional,” empathy. I will follow this
convention here, but we should keep in mind that the two are distinct—they
emerge from different brain processes; you can have a lot of one and a little
of the other—and that most of the discussion of the moral implications of
empathy focuses on its emotional side.

He adds the following:

In
general, empathy serves to dissolve the boundaries between one person and
another; it is a force against selfishness and indifference.

In part, this is true. Empathy, by my theory is an attempt
to form an unmediated connection with another person. Since that kind of
connection is impossible in reality, empathy allows people to live in a fiction.

One must add that selfishness and indifference are
constituted by behaviors. You might behave selfishly or indifferently, but that
might also be the result of the fact that you do not know any better. It does
not necessarily say anything about your heart.

Next, Bloom begins to make his case against empathy:

Empathy
is biased; we are more prone to feel empathy for attractive people and for
those who look like us or share our ethnic or national background. And empathy
is narrow; it connects us to particular individuals, real or imagined, but is
insensitive to numerical differences and statistical data. As Mother Teresa put
it, “If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.”
Laboratory studies find that we really do care more about the one than about
the mass, so long as we have personal information about the one.

Our
policies are improved when we appreciate that a hundred deaths are worse than
one, even if we know the name of the one, and when we acknowledge that the life
of someone in a faraway country is worth as much as the life a neighbor, even
if our emotions pull us in a different direction. Without empathy, we are
better able to grasp the importance of vaccinating children and responding to
climate change. These acts impose costs on real people in the here and now for
the sake of abstract future benefits, so tackling them may require overriding
empathetic responses that favor the comfort and well being of individuals
today. We can rethink humanitarian aid and the criminal justice system, choosing
to draw on a reasoned, even counter-empathetic, analysis of moral obligation
and likely consequences.

Bloom makes an interesting point. Others have argued that
empathy can inhibit action. (It is not an accident that empathy is based on
pathos, which is something that you suffer, while action is something that you
do.) When you empathize with someone who is in anguish because he does not know
what to do you too will feel that you do not know what to do.

Moreover, in his most salient point, Bloom remarks that
empathy only pertains to relationships with other individuals. It numbs us to
larger, more systemic problems and issues.

He adds, importantly that people who are good at what he
calls “unmitigated communion,” or what I would call an unmediated connection
are prey to the feelings of others, both positive and negative. This is what it
means to suffer an emotion or a passion.

In his words:

Individuals
scoring high in unmitigated communion report asymmetrical relationships, where
they support others but don’t get support themselves. They also are more prone
to suffer depression and anxiety.

Continuing, he compares empathy with compassion:

A
highly empathetic response would be to feel what your friend feels, to
experience, as much as you can, the terrible sorrow and pain. In contrast,
compassion involves concern and love for your friend, and the desire and
motivation to help, but it need not involve mirroring your friend’s anguish.

It
might also be of little help to other people because experiencing others’ pain
is exhausting and leads to burnout.

Bloom then notes that when you consult with a physician you
do not want him to feel your pain. You want a doctor who can express a calm
confidence when you are feeling anxious. Often when we consult with a physician
we make note of his emotions and use them to gauge the severity of our illness.

Bloom reports:

He gets
the most from doctors who don’t feel
as he does, who are calm when he is anxious, confident when he is uncertain.
And he particularly appreciates certain virtues that have little directly to do
with empathy, virtues such as competence, honesty, professionalism, and
respect.

As is well known, psychologists have latched on to empathy
because it glorifies feelings. And Bloom remarks, it glorifies a capacity in
which women excel more than men. It’s yet another effort to feminize the world…
the better to makes us more civilized, I assume.

Since psychologists believe that psychopathy is defined by a
lack of empathy, they assume that a dose of empathy will cure it. One must note
that most psychopaths are of the male persuasion.

To which Bloom responds, cogently:

… many
people diagnosed with psychopathy are excellent at reading others’ minds. This
is what enables them to be such masterful manipulators, con men, and seducers.
But the emotional part is thought to be absent—they cannot feel other people’s
pain—and this is why psychopaths are such terrible people.

Of course, psychopaths might
very well feel someone else’s pain and enjoy it. For some people pain is a
source of pleasure.

One might say that psychopaths
are terrible people, not because they do not feel the right feelings, but
because of the way they behave. They are proud of their bad character and take
joy in abusing the good character of other people.

They do not follow the rules,
but break them with impunity. They take advantage of those who follow rules and
are thrilled when they get away with something. One doubts that their condition will be cured by a
putting them on an empathy drip.

It is fair to say that
psychopaths are self-centered, but it might also be the case that theirs is a
politically and culturally subversive act.

4 comments:

One wonders if abortion is a form of feminist empathy? One of the wondrous things we do as human beings is define that which we would like to kill as not being human. It is what we have so many nice titles for almost every specific groups of people.One also wonders whether feminist empathy is how they so easily condemn about 50 percent of the population? This to the point that some feminists would like to see anyone who has testosterone be eliminated.Would the way young, and older, women's treatment of other women be an example of the kind of empathy demonstrated by women? Or Hillary's "What difference does it make?" statement provide an example of empathy?Given the fact that feminism seems to want to kill almost anything that gets in their way. I would suggest that we might want to rethink this idea that a feminized world is a more civilized world.

re: To be clear, empathy is a feeling, it is an emotion. You do not act empathically or even empathetically.

Simon Baron-Cohen and others divide empathy into two types cognitive and affective, so I wonder how we can keep both in mind in analysis? Cognitive empathy is related to "theory of mind" which allows you model another's inner states and evaluate motives.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy#Types

Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy: the capacity to respond with an appropriate emotion to another's mental states. Our ability to empathize emotionally is supposed to be based on emotional contagion: being affected by another's emotional or arousal state.

I see David Brooks wrote a (much shorter) article on the subject a few year ago with a similar conclusion:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/opinion/brooks-the-limits-of-empathy.html

So empathy is a necessary but not sufficient skill toward moral judgement.

"Empathy orients you toward moral action, but it doesn’t seem to help much when that action comes at a personal cost. You may feel a pang for the homeless guy on the other side of the street, but the odds are that you are not going to cross the street to give him a dollar. ... Nobody is against empathy. Nonetheless, it’s insufficient. These days empathy has become a shortcut. It has become a way to experience delicious moral emotions without confronting the weaknesses in our nature that prevent us from actually acting upon them. It has become a way to experience the illusion of moral progress without having to do the nasty work of making moral judgments."

The more I think about the more I think its a mistake to judge affective empathy without cognitive empathy.

Like perhaps people like dogs because they have "affective empathy" for their owners, so "A dog is a man's best friend" because he feels sad when you're sad and all that Barry Manilow.

But another human being will not only see that you're sad, but ask themselves why. They'll ask you why, but they'll also think for themselves and remember when they felt like that, and remember different ways they got out of it, including things like "tough love" where you tell a person what they need to hear, rather than what they seem to want to hear, or at least tough love is an answer after initial sympathy is offered.

But to be more than an unconditionally loving puppy dog, to see beyond what a person wants you to see, and to call them out on it, that's a tough skill, or a subtle one, where you can be wrong, and where you're responsible if you make things worse, while a puppy dog rarely will make things worse, and he'll let you kick him if he makes a mess while you're feeling bad about yourself and forget to let him outside.